


A Little Bruise Never Killed Anyone

by justheretobreakthings



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Keith (Voltron) Whump, Keith (Voltron) is a Mess, Keith (Voltron)-centric, Team as Family, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-11
Updated: 2018-04-15
Packaged: 2019-04-21 14:35:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14287053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justheretobreakthings/pseuds/justheretobreakthings
Summary: What started as a minor injury caused by a lucky hit from a bot during training turns out to be much graver than initally thought, and Shiro receives some startling revelations about his surrogate little brother.





	1. Chapter 1

“I’m  _fine_.”

Keith had been repeating the line like an exasperated mantra as the team packed away their bayards and prepared to leave the training deck, the gladiators having long disippated away. “Seriously, it barely even hurts. I can do another round.”

“I dunno, Keith,” Hunk said, a touch of that signature Hunk worry in his voice. “That staff hit you pretty hard. I thought I might have heard something crunch.”

“That was my armor,” Keith sighed. “It sounds like that when you hit it at the right angle.”

“Well, that gladiator sure found the rightest angle he could, didn’t he,” Lance said, thumping Keith on the back and making the latter wince and bring a hand back up to his side where the gladiator had struck him. “Little off your game today, aren’t you, Mullet?”

“It’s what you get for pulling those late nights training,” Pidge commented. “Seems a sleepy Keith is a slow Keith.”

Keith rolled his eyes. “You’re one to talk. How many hours of sleep do you manage a night when you’re up staring at that computer of yours?”

“I dunno, three, sometimes four?” Pidge said. “But it’s different for me. First, because I’m a mutant and I have superpowers. And second, because I’ve got Coran feeding me Space Espressos by the gallon, and you don’t, mister caffeine-gives-me-headaches.”

Shiro, hovering nearby, frowned at her. “Exactly how much of that ‘coffee’ have you been drinking?”

“Enough,” Pidge answered with a noncommital shrug.

“Pidge – ” Shiro started, in that tone he always used when he was ready to launch into a lecture.

But Pidge held her hands up to cut him off. “Hey, hey, let’s not lose focus here. I’m not the one who went and took a wallop in training.” Keith shot her a betrayed glare.

Shiro sighed and turned back to Keith. “You’re sure it didn’t hit you that hard?” he asked.

“I’m standing, aren’t I?” Keith asked. “I’m not bleeding, am I? There’s nothing to worry about.”

“Let’s test it,” said Lance. “Keith, do a cartwheel.”

“Piss off, Lance.”

“I just want to make sure that bot didn’t knock your dexterity right out of your body.” Lance widened his eyes and pouted in faux innocence. “Because I care.”

Keith huffed in annoyance and turned back to Shiro. “You see what you’ve caused?”

Shiro couldn’t help himself from letting a small chuckle escape him. “Okay, okay, if you’re still up for catfighting with Lance, I guess you can’t be hurt  _that_ bad. But could you at least let me get you an ice pack for it?”

“Fine,” Keith relented. “If it’ll give you peace of mind or whatever.”

“It will,” Shiro said with a nod.

Lance let out a loud yawn, stretching his arms over his head. “Okay, if we’re done here, I’m wiped. Coran’s got a stock of those juice pouches set up in the paladins’ lounge, right? Who wants to join me for some refreshment and fellowship?”

Pidge and Hunk agreed and led the way out of the training deck, Lance peering back over at Keith before making a move toward the door. “You coming, Mullet?”

“Nah, I’m just gonna – ”

“Aw, come on, man, you haven’t done any after-training cooldowns with us in ages.”

“So?”

“So, keep it up and you’re gonna regress back to Hermit Keith and I’m not letting that happen on my watch. Come on, we’ve got  _juuu-uice_ ,” he finished in a sing-song voice.

Keith sighed and looked to Shiro, as if hoping for a bail-out, but Shiro shrugged and cast him a little smirk. Lance wasn’t wrong; Keith  _did_  need to start spending more time with the paladins outside of training. Despite being out in space together all this time, the others still sometimes seemed to look at Keith as a practical stranger, and him always retiring immediately to his room after training didn’t help.

When it became clear Shiro wasn’t going to back him up, Keith turned back to Lance. “I kinda wanted to rest up.”

“You can rest in the lounge,” Lance said. “We’ve got couches.”

Another sigh. “Not gonna take no for an answer, are you?”

“I’m amazed it took you this long to realize it.”

“I’ll meet you there,” Shiro said, giving Keith a pat on the shoulder that doubled as a gentle little shove toward the door for him to follow Lance. Keith went with it, nodding to Lance and letting him take the lead out of the room and into the hall.

Shiro followed them out the door, ready to turn at a fork in the hallway to go to the kitchen and grab that ice pack, but he paused when he noticed Keith’s gait, the way he’d gone back to pressing his hand against his side, and seeming to favor the other side as he walked. Keith must have sensed him watching, because he turned his head to glance at him, then straightened up and dropped his hand to his side, giving him a forced smile.

Shiro frowned, but he didn’t say anything.

By the time he’d put an ice pack together and rejoined the others in the lounge, the rest of the paladins had spread out in the room, juice pouches in hand, each having claimed their own couch or cushion. He passed the ice pack to Keith, who had one couch all to himself, nestled in a corner in his underarmor. He nodded to Shiro as he took the ice, and grimaced at the cold when he pressed it to his side.

“You all right?” Shiro asked as he took a seat on the adjacent couch.

Keith groaned. “Shiro, for the last time – ”

“I know, I know, you’re fine. Just that you’re looking a little peaky is all.”

“Yeah, because I’m tired.”

“Then go ahead and nap, man,” Lance piped up from across the room.

Keith turned to him, eyes narrowed. “I’m not gonna fall asleep out here while you’re awake; you’ll probably just draw a moustache on my face the moment I’m out.”

“I wouldn’t do that while Shiro’s in the room. He’d ground me.”

“I’m not your dad, Lance,” Shiro said.

“Okay, but you sort of are.”

Shiro rolled his eyes, but he allowed Lance a small smile. “You do realize we overlapped a year as students at the Garrison, don’t you? I am _not_  that much older than you.”

Lance shrugged. “All that tells me is that you probably would have grounded me during my Garrison days too if you’d had the opportunity.”

“Guess that depends on whether you did anything worth grounding you for.”

Lance smirked. “I suppose that’s the nice thing about being so far from school. I can’t get in trouble if, say, people found out I was the person who put that frog in Iverson’s coffee pot.”

“You’re kidding,” Shiro groaned.

“Well, hey, it’s not all on me. Hunk’s the one who caught the frog for me in the first place.”

“Hey!” Hunk cried. “Don’t blame me! Besides, it was Pidge who swiped the key to Iverson’s office for you.”

“And I have never regretted something less in my entire life,” Pidge said with a solemn nod.

Shiro sighed. “Whatever happened to the fact that Garrison students were supposed to be good role models?”

“We  _were_  good role models,” Hunk insisted.

“Yeah, just a different target audience,” Pidge said.

Shiro groaned again, leaning back into his couch cushion and shutting his eyes. “You know what, I don’t want to hear it. I was perfectly happy just imagining that you were all sweet little well-behaved model pupils.”

Pidge and Lance both burst out laughing, and Keith winced at the noise as he slowly sipped from his juice pouch. Shiro tried to catch his eye, but Keith didn’t seem to notice.

“Oh, Shiro,” Lance said. “Dear, sweet, Shiro.”

“How many stories do we have in our arsenal?” Pidge asked.

“Depends how much time we have.”

“All the time in the world, I’m sure.”

“Excellent.”

And that was their cue to jump into an anthology’s worth of stories about their time at the Garrison, often talking over each other as they tried to remember the details. Hunk at least had the decency to seem embarrassed about some of their more brazen exploits, while Lance and Pidge simply seemed utterly proud of themselves.

Shiro mostly just listened, throwing in his obligatory groans and scoldings when it seemed right, although, honestly, he found himself entertained. Keith, it appeared, didn’t feel the same way, since he remained looking bored the whole time. His eyes kept glazing over and his head would occasionally droop down onto his chest before he snapped it back up. Shiro felt just a little relieved when Keith finally took him and Lance up on their earlier suggestion of napping and slowly stretched out on the couch, rolling onto his good side so that he faced away from the group and not making a sound or a movement afterward.

The other paladins didn’t seem to notice, as they kept up their storytelling, right up until, in the middle of Lance’s vivid description of the night they got caught sneaking onto the school roof after they had gotten overconfident and built a blanket fort there, Hunk let out a long, loud, yawn, and Shiro noticed that he was blinking more often and more slowly, in an effort to keep his eyes open. A quick observation showed that Lance and Pidge were doing the same.

“All right,” Shiro said, cutting Lance off mid-sentence and earning himself a pouting glower. “As much as I enjoyed hearing all these new reasons to worry about that fact that you three have been entrusted with weaponry, it’s getting late. We should be heading to bed.”

Pidge rolled her eyes. “Weak. The night is young, Shiro, we’re just getting started.” She immediately contradicted herself with a yawn.

“Sure you are, Pidge,” Shiro said. He stood up from his chair and stretched. “Well,  _I’m_  going to bed, which means you’re losing your audience, so there’s probably not much point to staying up anyhow.”

“Damn, he got us,” Lance said, standing up as well. “But yeah, I’m with him. Gotta have time to get my face properly pampered before I wind up falling asleep.”

Pidge still grumbled under her breath as she stood to follow Lance out, but Shiro figured it was more for show than actual resentment. As the paladins moved to leave, Hunk gestured toward Keith, who was still out cold on the couch. “Should we wake him up?” he asked. “Or, like, carry him to his room or something.”

Shiro smiled. “Nah, we finally got him to get some sleep. Let’s not risk ruining it. He’s already made himself comfortable, might as well stay the night.”

“All right. You coming?”

“Yeah, just a tick.” Shiro scanned the room until he spotted a blanket draped over the armrest of one of the couches, a somewhat scratchy afghan-like comforter that Lance had dragged into the lounge last time he’d taken a nap in here and had never bothered to put away.

He fetched the blanket and approached Keith, still smiling softly. It was always nice to see Keith asleep, and even nicer when it was actually a peaceful sleep rather than the tossing and turning or the mumbling in his sleep that Keith was wont to do. Shiro lowered the blanket, ready to drape it across Keith and listening for that soft almost-snore he made while asleep, even though Keith adamantly denied that he could possibly be a snorer.

But before his hands could let go of the blanket, he paused.

Something was wrong.

Keith may have been still and quiet, but now that Shiro had gotten a closer look at him, it became clear that it wasn’t because he was peaceful. Quite the opposite. His eyes were wrenched shut, too tightly, and his messy bangs were plastered by sweat onto his pale forehead – paler than usual. His mouth was slightly agape in his sleep, and rather than any soft snoring or deep, somnolent breaths, the sound coming out was too fast, and raspy and almost whistling, as if Keith were breathing through a straw.

“Shiro?” Hunk called from the entryway. “Is everything okay?”

Shiro’s head shot up, and for a moment he couldn’t believe that he had been on his way to go bed; he was so wide awake now. “Get Coran,” he said, sharp and commanding.

“What? Why?”

“Keith. He’s – I think he’s sick. Get Coran,  _now_.”

This time the urgency in his voice must have broken through to Hunk, because he hurried out into the hall. Distantly Shiro heard the voices of Lance and Pidge, although he couldn’t make out the words – probably just asking Hunk why he was running.

It didn’t matter. All Shiro needed to focus on right now was Keith. He wasn’t quite sure what to do, since he didn’t know what was actually wrong with him, so he ran through a mess of first aid tips in his head. He wasn’t supposed to move him, right? Or was that just for spine injuries? Weren’t there some occasions when you were supposed to elevate the legs? And Keith was asleep, or unconscious, Shiro couldn’t be sure; you were supposed to keep the person awake, right? If they had a concussion, that is. But wasn’t there something else they should stay awake for? God, it wouldn’t be so hard to remember his first aid training if he actually knew  _what was wrong_.

Deciding that he couldn’t stand doing nothing, he opted for trying to rouse Keith to consciousness. He tapped gently against Keith’s face with his hand, saying, “Come on, Keith. Wake up. Wake up, Keith. I need you awake, buddy, come on.”

Eventually he was rewarded for his efforts when Keith let out a soft groan and pried his eyes open, slowly and with a strained expression, as if each eyelid weighed a ton. “That’s it, Keith,” Shiro said. “Stay awake. At least ‘til we figure out what’s going on. Okay? Keith, are you with me?”

“Yeah,” Keith responded, quiet and low and not bothering to make the effort of actually looking at Shiro.

“Okay. Okay, good, just – just stay with me if you can. Keith, how’re you feeling? Does anything hurt?”

Keith’s brows wrinkled for a moment in thought before he slowly answered, “Yeah.”

“ _What_ hurts?” Shiro asked, trying to keep the frustration out of his voice.

There was a long pause as Keith seemed to consider the question and then dismiss it, opting to simply groan again instead. He eyes started to slide shut, and Shiro had to tap at his face again, had to keep him awake until he knew for sure it was okay to let him sleep.

He sagged with relief with he heard a small commotion erupt near the entryway to the lounge, and looked up to see Coran hastening into the room, Hunk on his tail and wheeling a narrow stretcher from the med bay behind him.

“Let me have a look,” Coran said, all business, and Shiro moved aside so the other man could take over. “Any idea what happened?”

Shiro shook his head. “No, no, I don’t – he was almost fine a little while ago, and then he fell asleep and – and he was sleeping for a while, I don’t know how long he’s been like… this.”

Coran pursed his lips as he pressed a hand to Keith’s forehead. “What do you mean ‘almost fine’?”

“He, um, he’d taken a hard hit during training. Do you think this is – ?”

“Where was he hit?”

“In the side. Left side.”

Without a second’s hesitation, Coran took the hem of Keith’s shirt and lifted it up to bare the boy’s chest, and Shiro’s breath caught in his throat. On Keith’s side, ride near the bottom of the ribcage, was a dark, enormous bruise, mottled black and purple stretching out into a splotch the size of his hand.

“That’s – how did – ?” Shiro began, but Coran cut him off by turning to Hunk and barking, “The stretcher, Hunk. Help me move him.”

Hunk hurried to oblige, wheeling the stretcher around the couch and taking the initiative to grab Keith’s legs to lift as Coran carefully moved his own hands under Keith’s back. A gesture of his head toward Shiro acted as a command for Shiro to help him lift Keith’s torso, keeping it as still and steady as possible as they moved him off the couch and onto the stretcher.

They practically raced out of the lounge, their path to the med bay a blur. Shiro was vaguely aware of passing Lance and Pidge in the halls at one point, and them having shouted questions, but he paid them no mind. Right now, he had tunnel vision, and everything aside from him and the path to get him fixed up may as well have been nonexistent.

Once they reached the med bay, they made quick work of getting Keith out of his clothes and into a cryosuit. Hunk ducked out of the med bay for this, for which Shiro was grateful; Keith had always been pretty modest with his body, never even going shirtless unless he was swimming, and having any more sets of eyes on him than absolutely necessary while he was changing would probably have been mortifying to him if he were any more conscious than he was now in his dizzy, half-asleep state.

They got him into a cryopod in record time, and Shiro’s stomach was clenched as he watched Coran tapping away at the buttons and screen at the side of the pod, displaying the results of an examining scan and detailing what needed fixing in Altean symbols that Shiro couldn’t read worth a damn, so he had to wait until Coran spotted his desperately inquisitive expression before he got answers.

“Internal bleeding,” Coran said. “It seems one of his ribs fractured and had scraped into his spleen, and it hadn’t clotted. The fatigue and clammy skin were from blood loss. But the pod is on it, and he’ll be good as new in a jiff.”

Shiro let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God,” he sighed.

“It’s a good thing you checked on him in his sleep, though. The abrasion in the spleen wasn’t clotting; if he’d gone the night he could very well have bled out, or at least come near it.” He turned to frown uncertainly at Shiro. “You said he received this injury during training?” Shiro nodded mutely. “May I ask why you didn’t look to treat it sooner?”

Shiro swallowed and looked toward the cryopod that now housed the still and eerily floating form of Keith, looking no better than he had when Shiro had gone to set that blanket on him.

“He, um – he said he was fine,” Shiro answered softly, and only now did he fully realize just how stupid he had been to have believed him.


	2. Chapter 2

The paladins had all received their reassurances from Coran that Keith was going to be fine. Pidge, Lance, and Hunk accept those reassurances with relief, and took Coran up on his suggestion that they should try to get some sleep, since it would be a while before Keith was out of the pod.

Shiro had been stunned by that, starting to fret all over again, since he knew that the longer someone had to be in a cryopod, the worse their injury had been, but Coran hastily explained that the cryopod simply took longer with internal injuries that external ones, and that he had nothing to worry about.

Shiro worried anyway.

And he kept worrying right up until the pod opened up and Shiro caught him in his arms as he dropped down, blinking woozily up at him.

“What – what happened?” Keith asked.

“It seems you took quite a hit from a training bot,” Coran said from over Shiro’s shoulder. “Managed to fracture a rib and cut into your spleen. Gave us all a good scare. Luckily we got you into the pod before any permanent damage was done.”

Keith winced, but there was something off about it. Shiro thought that coming out of a cryopod and discovering that you’d been brutally injured without even realizing it would be cause for alarm, or horror, or at the very least confusing, but Keith seemed more, well,  _embarrassed_  than anything else, biting at his lip and ducking his head down so his bangs fell into his eye. “Oh,” he said. “I – sorry. Guess I’ll have to try and be more careful, huh?”

Shiro stared at him, and judging by the silence behind him, Coran was staring too. Perhaps what happened just hadn’t really sunk in yet, since he was still out of sorts from the cryopod, and that was why his reaction was so understated. Or perhaps…

“Keith, do you understand what Coran meant?” Shiro asked. “You were injured pretty badly there. Cracked rib and internal bleeding. Why did you say you were – ?”

“I understand just fine, okay?” Keith interrupted him. “I heard you. Like I said, I’m sorry, and I’ll be more careful from now on. Where are the others, by the way? If I gave you all a scare, I should probably let them know I’m doing fine.

Shiro frowned at the clumsy dismissal of the topic at hand, and he opened his mouth to speak, but Coran answered him before he had the chance. “The other paladins retired to bed. It was already late and there were several vargas to wait until you were up, so they needed rest. I could send out an overhead page, let them know you’re awake.”

“Nah, don’t bother,” Keith said, shaking his head. “They’ll wake up on their own eventually, right? I, uh, I should probably be getting some sleep too, now I think about it. Thanks for, um, that.” He gestured toward the cryopod, and then turned on his heel, still just a little unsteady from his time in the pod, and started toward the door.

Coran and Shiro exchanged a glance before Shiro moved to catch up with him. “You know what, I’m gonna go ahead and walk you to your room.”

“I know where my room is,” Keith said, frowning up at Shiro.

“Buddy system.”

Keith raised a brow, but he shrugged. “All right, fine.”

Shiro drew even with him, wrapping his arm around the boy’s shoulder. With one last glance back at the concerned Altean watching them go, he steered Keith into the hall and toward his room, staying silent as they just focused on holding steady. He couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off. Keith always seemed a bit annoyed when Coran would patch up little cuts and bruises he found on the paladins after battles or training, but he should not have been reacting the same way to being prevented from possibly bleeding to death.

When they arrived in Keith’s room, Keith went straight for the foot of the bed where his day clothes – which doubled as his night clothes – were folded up, and gathered them into his arms.

“Do you want me to grab you anything to eat?” Shiro asked. “Something real quick before you sleep? I know the cryopod can make people peckish.”

Keith shook his head. “Nah, that’s okay, I’m not hungry, just tired.”

“Water, then, at least? You have to at least be thirsty.”

“Not really, no.” He turned away to move toward the bathroom. “I’ll eat and drink at breakfast after I wake up. I’m just gonna go change into – ”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were hurt?”

Keith paused in his movement, and turned back to Shiro. “Huh?”

“You heard me.”

His brow furrowed. “I – you already knew I took a bit of a blow in training. I didn’t need to tell you.”

“Yes, I knew you had taken a hit,” Shiro said. “But I didn’t know you had gotten _hurt_. Like, really hurt. Keith, you fractured a rib, and you tried to, what, keep it a secret? Why? We’ve all taken some bad blows in battle, no one would have thought any less of you for a little slip-up.”

Keith sighed, and, apparently deciding to postpone his trip to the bathroom for now, set his day clothes back onto his bed. “It’s nothing like that, Shiro,” he said. “Honest. I just didn’t realize how badly it was hurt, that’s all.”

“So when you kept holding your side and pulling faces? You’re saying that that wasn’t because you were hurting?”

“No, I – look, I knew I was  _hurt_ , sure, but how was I supposed to know that it was a busted rib and, what was it, my kidney bleeding?”

“Your spleen,” Shiro corrected him.

“Yeah. Same difference. Shiro, I already said I was sorry. I just – I don’t know what else you want me to say.”

Shiro let out a long breath and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Keith, what do you mean, you’re sorry? You’re sorry for not telling me you were hurt?”

“Well yeah, that, but, um, more for, you know, the trouble?” He looked down uneasily and made as if he were shoving his hands into his pockets before realizing that the cryosuit didn’t have any, so he ended up just positioning his hands stiffly and awkwardly at his side. “I hadn’t meant to scare you or anything, or, um, put everyone out like that.” He glanced back up when he received no response from Shiro, only to find the older paladin staring at him, eyes wide. “What?”

“You – you think  _that’s_  what I’m upset about?” Shiro asked, incredulous.

Keith hesitated. “…No?”

“Keith – ”

“Look, it doesn’t really matter, okay?” Keith cut him off, a hint of a glare beginning to trickle onto his face. “I’m fine  _now_. Yeah, I should have paid more attention to what was hurting and all, and I’ll keep that in mind from now on, but it’s all healed up, right? There’s nothing to discuss.”

“There  _is_  something to discuss,” Shiro said. “Keith, you still haven’t told me why you didn’t tell me you were hurt.”

Keith let out a huff. “Because, I would’ve taken care of it! I figured, you know, if it had been something actually bad, I would have noticed it when I was getting ready for bed, and I would have patched it up or gotten Coran or something. It’s not my fault Lance made me go with everyone to the lounge after training. If I’d just gone straight to bed, everything would have been fine.”

Shiro shook his head in disbelief. “Keith, if you thought you needed to check on it, why didn’t you  _say_ so?”

“Well, it might not have been anything to worry about! What would be the point in getting you worked up and fretting for nothing?”

“It wasn’t nothing.”

“I  _know_  that, but I’m saying it  _could_ have been. Shiro, everything turned out just fine, you’re making too big a deal out of – ”

With a grunt of frustration, Shiro crossed the room to Keith and put his hands on his shoulders, squeezing them maybe just a little too tightly to demand his full attention. “Keith,” he said, voice stern and commanding and heavy. “You – could – have –  _died_. From a  _training accident_. So no, I am not making too big a deal out of anything. We can’t brush this off, Keith. Not after  _that_.”

Keith gulped and lifted his shoulders in a slight shrug to slide out of Shiro’s grip. “I – I wouldn’t have died,” he said, but his voice had less volume now, less conviction. “I was going to take care of it.”

“It doesn’t matter what you were going to do or what you were planning to do. What matters is what actually happened. You were unconscious from blood loss, Keith. Coran said the blood wasn’t clotting properly, so you could very well have bled to death on that sofa last night while the rest of us were asleep. And you  _scared_  me, kiddo. I just about had a heart attack when I saw you like that. Why would you not have said something? Any one of us could have helped, Keith, and we could have avoided all of this.”

Keith let out a sigh and, bringing a hand up to comb his fingers through his hair in agitation, he lowered himself onto the edge of his bed. “Look, Shiro, I get it. I know, that was – things got too close for comfort, and that’s bad and all. But I promise, Shiro, it was a fluke. I’ll be more careful going forward, and if there’s something I can’t handle, I’ll come to you. You don’t have to worry, okay? Trust me, I’ve always been able to deal with this stuff just fine; this whole night was just a freak thing.”

Shiro let out his own sigh, letting his shoulders drop. It wasn’t completely ideal, but at least Keith finally seemed to have wrapped his head around how bad that accident was, or could have been. He would just have to make sure that Keith stuck to his word and didn’t try to –

Wait…

“Keith?” Shiro said.

“Yeah?”

“You said you’ve ‘always been able to deal with’ things like this. What is that supposed to mean?”

Keith blinked at him. “I – I said that?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.”

There was silence between them, and Keith squirmed on the bed as Shiro stared down at him. Shiro was the one to break the quiet. “Have you been hiding other injuries from us? From me?”

“No!” Keith answered, quickly, much too quickly.

Shiro narrowed his eyes. “ _Keith_.”

“I haven’t been  _hiding_ anything,” Keith insisted. “I’ve just been taking care of myself, that’s all. There’s a difference.”

“Lies by omission are still lies.”

“It’s not like I was actively trying to lie to you or anything. I just… had things under control.”

Letting out a slow sigh, Shiro joined Keith at the bed, lowering himself down to sit beside him, getting them back to near the same level. “How long have you ‘had things under control’, Keith? Were you hurt in some of the battles? When Sendak raided the castle? Have there been any other accidents in training?”

Keith lowered his head to press the heel of his hand to it. “Yeah, there’s, um, there’s been some stuff here and there I’ve had to fix up. Just stuff Coran can’t catch with a once-over. It’s, uh, it’s not really a matter of how long. Since I’ve honestly kinda been doing this pretty much my whole life. It just makes things easier.”

Shiro’s brow furrowed. “Your whole life?”

“Basically,” Keith said. “I – I’m not saying I was in elementary school setting my own broken bones or anything; it was originally just little things like getting my own band-aids and knowing when something can be left to heal on its own.”

“And you were doing this… as a kid?”

Keith frowned up at him. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“That – that thing people do when they look at me like I’m Oliver Twist or some shit. You know I’ve had some crap go down in the past, and it’s really not a big deal. It’s not as bad as it sounds either. Usually it was just easier to take care of things myself than to get people worried or inconvenience them or waste first-aid supplies or whatever. And it’s not like it wasn’t effective, I knew what I was doing, and I got better at it over time.”

Somewhere deep in his gut Shiro was starting to feel queasy. “Keith, that’s – that shouldn’t have happened. You shouldn’t have had to – ”

“Yeah, I realize that. Lots of things happen that  _shouldn’t_  have happened, Shiro. That doesn’t make a lot of difference. That’s just how it was, okay? And it’s not like it was even really a bad thing, you know? Because it’s useful stuff to know how to do. I learned how to take care of myself, and that’s good. Hell, I don’t think I could have survived the last year if I hadn’t gotten in the practice.”

“What do you…?”

“Oh, come on, Shiro,” Keith sighed, exasperated. “I was out in the desert. The nearest clinic was on the Garrison campus, and I couldn’t exactly use that one, and the next closest was an hour away by hoverbike. So if I’m going about my day and something gets fractured or something needs to get stitched up, what am I supposed to do, drive for an hour while injured and maybe throw some insurance fraud into the mix to cover the bills?”

Shiro could feel the blood draining from his face. “Wait, you’ve given yourself  _stitches?”_

“Shiro, you know full well that I know how to sew.”

“Yes,  _clothes_ , not  _skin_. God, Keith, doesn’t – doesn’t it hurt you, to do all that?”

“Well, yeah,” Keith said. “Yeah, it, um, honestly it hurts like hell. But it would hurt a lot more to let an open wound get infected, so…” He shrugged. “I just did what I had to do, that’s all.”

Shiro took a deep breath. Okay. That was… not good. But it was something he could deal with, something he and Keith could talk through now that it was out in the open.

“All right, I, um, I understand. That this was something you needed to do, taking care of yourself. But you don’t have to do that anymore, Keith. You’re not in that desert anymore, and you’re not alone. The castle’s medical equipment is state of the art, and you have as much of a right to it as anyone else on this team, okay? So you don’t need to handle this sort of thing on your own.”

To his surprise, Keith shook his head. “Shiro, I – I get what you’re trying to do and all, but really, it’s okay. I don’t want to get out of practice.”

And Shiro found himself staring again. “Out of practice?”

“Right. I mean, while we’re here with Voltron, sure, we’ve got the luxury of the cryopods and those advanced medicines and stuff, but if I get used to it and start relying on it all the time, then it’s going to be absolute hell trying to go back.”

“Go  _back?_  Keith, what do you – what are you saying? Are you planning to go back to that shack?”

“Oh, God, no,” Keith said. “But, Shiro, this whole Voltron thing, it’s temporary. We both know it. Once we’re done with it, I don’t know what my next step will be. Maybe I’ll end up going back to Earth, maybe I’ll stay somewhere and help rebuild what got lost to the Galra, I don’t know. But I’m going to be on my own to do it. And I… I have to still be able to take care of myself. I can’t risk getting rusty.”

Shiro was still staring at Keith, trying to meet his eyes, but Keith’s gaze was locked firmly onto his knees as he talked, not even so much as glancing toward Shiro, just blinking stubbornly at the ground. And from the way Keith’s voice was starting to wobble, Shiro feared that he may be blinking back evidence that he wasn’t as okay with what he was saying as he was trying to pretend.

“Keith,” he said softly. “You’re not going to be on your own. You’ve got us. We’re – God, Keith, we’re practically a family, we wouldn’t let that happen.”

Keith let out a dry chuckle that held no humor whatsoever. “Shiro, I, uh, I know for the two of us we’re close, we’re – we’re practically – ”

“I’ve told you before that I think of you as my little brother,” Shiro said. “And I still do.”

“Right. But – but we don’t know how things are going to turn out. You’ve said yourself that, um, that you – with leading Voltron and all, something could – ” He took a shaky breath, and didn’t bother finishing the sentence. “And I’ve had to be without you before, Shiro. I hated it, but it had to be done, and I could have to do it again. As for the others?” He shook his head. “We’re not a family, Shiro. We’re teammates. We’re basically coworkers. Do you honestly think any of the others will want me tagging around with them after this is over? Can you, say, imagine Lance wanting to spend more time with me than what is absolutely necessary for the sake of the universe?”

“Yes,” Shiro said firmly.

Keith just sighed. “Then you’re a hell of a lot more optimistic than you should be.”

Shiro opened his mouth to reply, but the words were lost somewhere in his throat, because he didn’t know what he was supposed to say now. What  _could_  he say now? Was he supposed to tell him that everything was going to be okay? He’d told him the exact same thing before he’d left for Kerberos, and it hadn’t exactly held true. Was he supposed to weave together some empty words about how, no, Keith, that’s not true, of course everyone here wants you around forever.

He wanted that to be true. But he was painfully aware of the fact that people didn’t tend to take to Keith easily, not the way Shiro did. Any reassurances otherwise would be empty gestures at best, lies at worst.

For now, the only thing he could think of was to be a big brother, and he hoped that was enough.

Slowly he reached out a hand to take Keith by the shoulder again, more gently than before. “Hey. Keith. Look at me.” Keith did, and Shiro did his damnedest to convince himself that Keith’s eyes weren’t dewy and his nose hadn’t taken on a shade of pink, that it was just a trick of the light. “I can’t promise you that things are always going to be okay. But – but I can do everything in my power to make things okay  _now_. I mean it. I don’t want to see you hurt like that again.” He paused, and then rephrased. “I don’t want you to  _be_  hurt like that again, but if you are, I want to know. That’s the only way I’m going to be able to help.”

“Shiro, you really don’t have to – ”

“I know I don’t have to. I  _want_  to. Okay? I hate the fact that you’ve had to patch yourself up for as long as you have, and if I could go back in time and keep that from ever happening, I would, but for now, I at least want to make sure that you don’t have to do that here, not while I’m around. Promise me, Keith, that if you need to be fixed, you’ll come to me. You’ll let me do that for you.”

Keith frowned, his brow pinch. “You don’t – I – I get hurt all the time, Shiro, all of us do. I can take care of the little stuff on my own.”

“I know you can,” Shiro said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, I’m here for you, and I want to make the most of it for as long as I can. So, by all means, come to me with the little stuff. I mean it. You can come let me know every time you stub your toe, or pinch your finger, or burn your tongue, or poke your eye, or tear a hangnail, or  _anything_ , and I’ll be perfectly fine with it. I would much rather you come to me with a thousand tiny problems that don’t matter than have you not let me know about just one that  _does.”_

Keith let out a sigh. “I appreciate the gesture, but – ”

“Then take me up on it. Please, Keith. For me. I’m asking you as a friend. Erm, no, scratch that, I’m asking you as your cool and overprotective big brother.” He cast him a slight smile. “Promise me you’ll let me be here for you.”

For a long moment Keith didn’t say anything. Then, ever so slowly, he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I promise.”

To Shiro’s ears the words sounded flat, insubstantial. He got the feeling Keith was just saying the words, not putting any meaning behind them. Well, that was okay. Shiro could work with that. He had done this before, taken Keith by the hand and shown him that he was allowed to let someone in, that he deserved to have another person care about him. And it wouldn’t be easy, or quick, but he knew he could do it again.

At least, he thought he could.

He hoped he could.

He would try.

**Author's Note:**

> I post stuff early on [my tumblr](http://justheretobreakthings.tumblr.com). So if you want to watch me hurt Keith ahead of schedule, that's where it happens.


End file.
